The last few weeks have been quite eventful for us Catholics. Pope Benedict XVI shocked the world by announcing that he would be stepping down as head of the 1.2 billion-member Catholic Church.

His decision has thrust the papacy and Catholicism in general into the cultural spotlight and has provoked the ire of many Fundamentalists, who have long been scandalized by the adulation Catholics pay to the man we call "Holy Father."

Around the time Pope Benedict XVI released Summorum Pontificum, which expanded the use of the extraordinary form of the Roman rite of the Mass, I attended a Catholic conference at the Old St. Ferdinand Shrine in Florissant, Missouri. The shrine boasted a lovely pre-Vatican II altar that inspired a...

I love reading conversion stories. I've read so many of them that I sometimes don't remember exactly what a convert said about his journey, only that he entered the Church. That's the case with a story I remember reading years ago, probably in an anthology of conversion stories. I don't remember a lot of the details, only an extraordinary tale of answered prayer.

This convert had attended a famous Protestant seminary in the U.S., one which had been seeing a surprising number of its...